The surprising Pittsburgh roots of emoticons

Did you know the world’s first emoticon was made in the Steel City back in 1982 at our very own Carnegie Mellon University?

Back then, when the internet was in its infancy, a group of professors were trying to figure out how to make it clear when online discussions were meant to be funny. Professor Scott Fahlman made a suggestion that would one day lead to the library of emojis we have today:

“I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:–)

Read it sideways.”

The rest is history, as they say.

“By stringing together a colon, hyphen and parenthesis,” CMU reportedly noted in its acknowledgment of the emoticon’s 25th anniversary, “Fahlman gave computer users a tool to express emotion in their email messages. For the first time, people were able to communicate humor or positive feelings with a smile, or express negative feelings with a frown :–(. The little characters helped to dispel misunderstandings and sThis first appeared in our Technical.ly Pittsburgh newsletter. Sign up for our free newsletter to get more stories like this in your inbox before they go online.”quelch what otherwise could result in ‘flame wars,’ in which the original subject of a conversation was completely lost in diatribe.”

Here’s the full exchange that led to the now-ubiquitous smiley face.

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